The importance of content to your keyword strategy

If you’re in the casino affiliate marketing business, you’re probably an expert in your niche.

And if you’ve been in the business for a few years, you’ve probably witnessed the increasing importance of your website’s authority to your natural search results, and thusly, your traffic.

This situation is not going to change anytime soon. In fact, on Jan. 21, 2011, Principal Google Engineer Matt Cutts blogged about “content farms,” websites with shallow and low-quality content. Cutts said that Google will continue to make changes to its algorithm that favors sites with original, high-quality content.

Use your expertise to your advantageAnd this is where your expertise matters.

Regardless of whether you know online slots, poker or bingo, you’ve probably spent a lot of time giving advice to website’s visitors. And it’s through that advice that you hook them in, get repeat traffic, and get backlinks, links back to your site that serve as endorsements of your content.

To get quality placement in the search engines, you’re going to have to keep doing this. In fact, as Google pays even more attention to content, you’re likely going to have to boost your content creation efforts.

What is quality content?As you create a stream of keyword-focused, quality content, focus on these elements:

Make it unique — Don’t plagiarize or borrow content from other sites.
Make it matter — Every page on your site should add value for the user.
Structure it — Use an easy-to-follow structure for your navigation and make sure each page of content is written following best practices.

And of course, you need to have enough content on each page to make it relevant in Google’s eyes. The ideal word length is around 400-700 words, with a bare bones minimum of 300.

And then there’s your keywords. Yes, they should be in all the relevant places on your page. But if you overstuff your keywords, it will hurt you more than it helps. Stick to a keyword density of 2-4 percent. Be very careful that you don’t go over 4 percent.

In fact, you might want to just try writing about your topic and using a natural flow to determine how often you repeat your keywords.

You’ll probably get better results in the search engines and you’ll certainly get more readers.